A trip to Normandy puts discomfort into perspective

As my family and I stepped off a train in Bayeux, France, we were greeted by cold, stinging rain.

"This is like the weather they experienced around D-Day," said our guide, who we hired to drive us to the coast of Normandy and tour us around the World War II sites.

He said it gleefully as though we should be thrilled with fog, wind and unremitting rain.

It was the middle of February 2010, and we were traveling with our then-1-year-old daughter. I was pregnant with our son and trying to rally from a bout of morning sickness.

I just wanted to find the nearest cafe and huddle over some hot coffee.

But I couldn't. This pilgrimage was personal.

I wanted to see the place where my grandfather, a career Air Force pilot, flew his first-ever mission on June 6, 1944. D-Day.

John Kassab was just 23 years old when he piloted a B-24 over the English Channel and dropped bombs on German supply stockpiles somewhere near the town of Caen. Just two years earlier he had been working in a brickyard in Pennsylvania.

I thought about that as I looked out over Omaha Beach.

It didn't take long to feel the pettiness of my discomforts.

Normandy has a way of doing that.

Everywhere you look is evidence of enormous human sacrifice.

We saw church pews still stained with blood from when the tiny sanctuary was used as a makeshift hospital. We saw the craters left by bombs and the holes in stone buildings pierced by shrapnel.

And there is row after row of perfectly aligned white crosses in the American cemetery.

Our guide told us the cemetery staff will sometimes rub a little wet sand from Omaha Beach into the engraved name on the cross when the family of a fallen man visits. After it dries, the sand glints like gold leaf in the sun.

Normandy makes you stop and consider things much bigger than yourself, particularly the monumental effort by the Allies to change history.

Normandy can be overwhelming, even daunting. But my granddad wasn't like that at all.

I knew him as a big, fun guy who was always up for taking my brother and me on some kind of adventure when we visited him and my grandmother in Mobile, Ala.

We'd explore the U.S.S. Alabama battleship in Mobile Bay. Or we'd climb around the old Colonial-era fort nearby.

He liked to build things and he'd let us nose around his backyard workshop. He worked at the Red Cross and found a bunch of wooden tongue depressors there and cut them up for shingles on the roof of a dollhouse he made for me.

When he talked about the war he was honest about how scared he was. And he had a disarming sense of humor about it too.

One of his favorite stories to tell was about that first mission on D-Day.

He was part of the 453rd Bombardment Group stationed in Old Buckenham, England.

Jimmy Stewart, of "It's a Wonderful Life" fame, was the operations officer of his group.

The way my granddad told it, the plane he was assigned was having mechanical trouble and his crew was scared to get on board.

In 2009 he recounted what happened next to the Mobile Press-Register.

Stewart, he said, "came up to me and said, 'Son, I know you're scared.' And I said, 'That's right.' And he said, 'There's a good airplane down here just like yours, and it's already loaded with bombs.' So off we went, and that was D-Day."

He went on to fly 29 more missions.

The next year he married my grandmother, Nita Kassab, and spent another 20 years in the Air Force. He served in Korea and retired as a lieutenant colonel. Later he spent time in Vietnam with the Red Cross.

My dad says his father never talked much about his time in combat until long after he retired.

"Then he talked about it more like an adventure," my dad told me.

My granddad died in 2011 when he was 89.

On Friday, the 70th anniversary of D-Day, I thought about how lucky I was to hear his stories.

And how I will never again be so grateful to stand in the freezing rain as I was that day in Normandy when I stared out over the beaches and felt a small connection to history.